Clinton's man Larry Summers and connections

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arrow
Excerpt:
Arrow is brother to the economist Anita Summers, uncle to economist Larry Summers, and brother-in-law of the economist Robert Summers.

http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Larry_Summers
Along with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, Summers brought about elimination of key US financial regulations including the Glass-Steagall Act. He was particularly aggressive in his efforts to block regulations of derivatives, regulations that might have prevented the economic meltdown the US suffered in 2008. According to economist Dean Baker, "The policies he promoted as Treasury Secretary and in his subsequent writings led to the economic disaster that we now face." ^[6]

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2008/11/24/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-lawrence-larry-summers
Excerpt:

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Lawrence ‘Larry’ Summers

President-elect Barack Obama named Summers head of the National Economic Council.

By Jennifer O'Shea

November 24, 2008

1. Lawrence Henry Summers was born on Nov. 30, 1954, in New Haven, Conn. He is the oldest of three sons born to economics professors Robert and Anita Summers, who were teaching at Yale when he was born.
2. Summers's extended family also includes other very distinguished economists—he has two uncles who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Paul Samuelson of MIT is his father's brother (the older Summers changed his name as a young man), and Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow is his uncle on his mother's side.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/04/04/larry-summerss-millions/
Excerpt:
Larry Summers made a lot of money last year, and boy is it voyeuristically impossible to resist looking through his disclosure to see who paid him what. The really big money, unsurprisingly, came from DE Shaw: a salary of $1,432,497 (weird amount, that), along with partnership distributions of $3,756,126, for a total of $5,188,623. But just because he was earning $100,000 a week from DE Shaw doesn’t mean he wasn’t earning lots of money elsewhere, too: his speaking engagements alone came to another $2.8 million or so.
Of particular interest to me is the amount that Nouriel Roubini was paying Summers to sit on the advisory board of Roubini Global Economics, where I used to work: $147,500 a year. Somehow I doubt that fellow board member Marc Uzan was pulling down a similar amount.
But Summers’s speeches are interesting too, especially the foreign ones: $67,500 from Tata Conultancy Services; $90,000 from the Asociation de Bancos de Mexico; $103,500 from the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Baja California; $112,500 from Centro de Liderazgo y Gestion in Colombia; the same amount from IESE Business School in Spain; $135,000 from the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina; and a whopping $225,000 from Leaders and Company, the publishers of This Day newspaper in Nigeria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouriel_Roubini
Excerpt:
The child of Iranian Jews, he grew up in Italy. After receiving a BA in political economics at Bocconi University, Milan and a doctorate in international economics at Harvard University, he became an academic at Yale and a practicing economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and Bank of Israel. Much of his early research focused on emerging markets. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, later moving to the United States Treasury Department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, who in 2009 became Treasury Secretary.

http://www.economicpredictions.org/nouriel-roubini-predictions/index.htm
Excerpt:
Who Predicted the Financial Crisis

The Accuracy and Reliability of Nouriel Roubini's PredictionsCan they be relied on for investment decisions?

Nouriel Roubini Predictions

Correction Note:
Initial research findings (April 4, 2011) questioned whether Dr. Nouriel Roubini, also known as Dr. Doom, actually predicted the financial crisis or was erroneously promoted by the media without sufficient fact checking. On April 19, 2011 we received a copy of the IMF transcript from ECRI. We can now include Dr Roubini among the experts who did warn about the financial crisis. However, the research results found several incorrect predictions and analysis. The findings cast doubt about Roubini's the accuracy and the value of his predictions in making investment decisions. (See research notes below)

Photo Source: Wiki

Dr. Nouriel Roubini, Chairman, Co-Founder, Roubini Global Economics
Nouriel Roubini is the co-founder and chairman of Roubini Global Economics, an innovative economic and geostrategic information service and consultancy named one of the best economics websites by Business Week, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. He is also a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the Senior Economist for International Affairs at the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then the Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department.

Dr. Roubini’s views on global economics issues are widely cited by the media, and he is a frequent commentator on various business news programs. He has been the subject of extended profiles in the New York Times Magazine and other leading current-affairs publications. The Financial Times has also provided extensive coverage of Dr. Roubini’s viewpoints.

Dr. Roubini received an undergraduate degree at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University. Prior to joining Stern, he was on the faculty of Yale University’s department of economics.

http://www.progressive.org/wx112010.html
Excerpt:

It documents how the CEOs of the largest investment banks in the country gambled on housing derivatives that they knew were highly risky, misled investors about those risks, and made out like the bandits they are with grotesque bonuses.
As Ferguson points out, no one’s gone to jail. No one’s had to repay those bonuses or make whole those swindled investors. The scandal just goes on and on.
Ferguson gets clips from some of the leading players (who refused to be interviewed, as he tells us) and does a terrific job skewering some of the lesser ones who do agree to be interviewed. To help provide commentary, Ferguson enlists George Soros, Eliot Spitzer, and NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini.
Ferguson doesn’t just blame the Wall Street CEOs. “Inside Job” points out how the credit rating agencies were in on the scam, and how leading economists, including Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, were asleep at their textbooks.
What’s more, it shows how one President after another, from Reagan through Clinton and George W, deregulated Wall Street at enormous cost.
And how Obama has not done nearly enough in response.
Go see this movie. It’s a real eye-opener—and a stomach-turner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_equilibrium
Excerpt:
General equilibrium theory is a branch of theoretical economics. It seeks to explain the behavior of supply, demand and prices in a whole economy with several or many interacting markets, by seeking to prove that a set of prices exists that will result in an overall equilibrium, hence general equilibrium, in contrast to partial equilibrium, which only analyzes single markets. As with all models, this is an abstraction from a real economy; it is proposed as being a useful model, both by considering equilibrium prices as long-term prices and by considering actual prices as deviations from equilibrium.